Topics

1

Developers / Making the Move

« on: March 03, 2012, 06:06:29 am »

Now I have my hope setup and running without my help. I am finally in a position to dig deeper into its brains and start helping where I can. I figure the 810 release is stable enough for this round through, and so with Ubuntu 12 coming this year, focusing our efforts on getting LMCE 12 would be an ample goal, and I am still working on the windows ports of the q orbiter (nice work btw guys! the qT framework is quite nice once you beat it into submission ).

So until thom makes an official announcement regarding moving to Ubuntu 12, I will move my entire house to 1004 so I can work on the qorbiter coding and fix some hanging issues that I have had with 810.

Any suggestions on pre-paring myself for the switch, or is it pretty much ground zero rebuild? I have made most of my changes into automated scripts so that hopefully if the DB structures are not too different deployment should go well. But please let me know if anyone else has had an experience good or bad with upgrading from 810 to 1004

Kind Regards,
~jw

2

Users / Touch Screen Issue

« on: February 27, 2012, 10:15:22 pm »

Hey everyone,

I have an unusual issue with two touchscreen based MD's. One of them uses a penmount panel (with latest 8.10 ubuntu drivers) and the other is a TSHARC panel (again with latest drivers)

The issue is the following, If I boot the MD's into the orbiter (either with reboot, or by a a killall xinit && /usr/pluto/bin/Start_X.sh command) the touch screens will not function properly unless I touch the panel the moment X starts before the oribiter starts to load. As long as I register a click before the orbiter appears they work fine... but I haven't been able to figure out why...

Anyone have any thoughts and or ideas on a workaround (maybe script that simulates a click event before the orbiter loads??)

Thanks
~jw

3

Developers / Notes On Diskless Boot times in 810

« on: February 21, 2012, 04:56:39 am »

I was having a maddening time with the diskless boot times on my MD in 810 (I am not sure if this is an issue unique to me or if other people are having the issue, so please let me know if anyone else had this problem, it isn't anywhere in the forums that I could find, but it is all over the Ubutnu forums)

Essentially upon booting my diskless MD's I would get an NIS bind failure that looks like

Code: [Select]

Starting NIS Services
   binding to YP ...
...
... [repeat 10 times]

               [failed]
               [ok]

Along with this, starting cups, hal, and a few other services on the MD would hang forever. My MD boot times were on the order of about 8-10 mins (and these aren't little MD's, my main computer is a monster and it had the same problem) so I figured it had to be a networking issue.

Additionally, DNS lookups from MDs (like when doing an apt-get install on the MD) took forever (though oddly nslookup and dig were always responsive ~ms). And ssh moonXX would take ages to give me a command prompt (~3 mins from time I issued command from the core).

Looking at the /etc/nsswitch.conf file on the MD and core suggests that nis is used for host propagation, and given the dns issues it seemed likely that despite what many of the forums out there say about this binding to yp... failure, ypbind was never actually finding the NIS server on the core.

Furthermore, running ypbind -d on the core would never actually show a successful response from the core itself.

It turns out the issue is in /etc/ypserv.securenets for some odd reason my file had my external nic's IP as a trusted host, and none of my MD's nor the core's internal ip was listed as a trusted host. Adding

Code: [Select]

host 192.168.80.1
host 192.168.80.XX //MD's ip addr
....

for each configured MD and then doing a #sudo service nis restart allows the core and the MD's (reboot or run service nis restart on the MD's) to successfully bind to the NIS server and everything starts working great. ssh moonXX is basically instantaneous as you would expect from a lan machine. And even better the MD boot time is about 30-45 seconds from BIOS.

I haven't figured out what generates the ypserv.securenets file yet (I suspect its somewhere in one of the diskless setup scripts) but if anyone knows off the top of their head let me know.

Some things I will note.

My core was originally just designed to be a z-wave controller for lights/thermostat/etc... and not a media server. So the machine when I first installed LMCE had a single nic. Once I decided to put MD's in I added another nic and this caused issues with /etc/exports which I did resolve but I believe its possible that the same issues with the interface configuration were propagated into the NIS config.

Therefore if anyone else has had this binding issue and had 2 NIC's when they originally installed LMCE, please let me know so I can figure out if this was just a stupid mistake on my part for not following the guidelines and having 2 NICs in the first place, or if it is an issue in the diskless setup scripts.

Thanks!
~jw